Fokko Veegens

About

I am an ALM Consultant at Delta-N BV The Netherlands (http://www.delta-n.nl). On a daily basis I help teamleads, developers, testers and architects to optimize their processes and the usage of Microsoft (ALM) tooling.

Sooner or later, every TFS Administrator will face the challenge to set TFS Permissions with a script instead of the UI. When you start searching for this you will find TFSSecurity.

TFSSecurity is a command line tool and allows you to do all kinds of permissions activities. Adding groups, adding users to groups and setting permissions to artifacts in TFS. On of the hard things in TFS is the number of permissions you can set and the number of places where you can set them. You can find a list with all permissions in TFS on MSDN.

So, you have found TFSSecurity and you know what you want to set..Great ! Now you need to understand the TFSSecurity syntax. And that is, to say it nicely, very very hard.

To set permissions you need TFSSecurity /a+. The syntax of TFSSecurity looks like this

For a customer I am creating reports related to Test Cases. In order to retrieve the data, I use the Tfs_Warehouse database (relational warehouse). For several situations, Microsoft has conveniently created SQL Server Views on top of the tables available in the database. For Test Cases the View “vDimTestCaseOverlay” is available. In my case however, this View had some “problems”…